Day 6: Scenery

Today was a day of visual spectacle. At least, I assume. It’s been a while since I created the draft of this, and it’s just called “Scenery”. Let’s find out together what happened, as I re-acquaint myself with the map.

We wake up in a Loves truck stop, in Hooker, OK. It’s probably chilly, but not snowing. I don’t remember snow. Reviewing the footage, it’s dark. So incredibly dark.

Hello?

We must drive on, until it is light. As the sun cracks the horizon, we stop to fuel up, before resuming our endless trek. We round the next corner, and there it is. US Highway 512. The longest straight road in America. At least if you believe our travel guide.

It’s kinda hilly though. It might be straight, but at no point did I think “I can see forever”

I don’t recall if it was planned, however after the road we spotted “No Man’s Land Beef Jerky”. Turns out this is actually their HQ and where they make stuff, but they don’t actually distribute much from here, they just have a small shelf. They did have some samples on the counter, and we found a couple of great flavors and bought some from their small shelf.

They also had a bunch of cats.

For reasons unclear, we stop just after crossing in to New Mexico, which is also a couple hundred meters past the corner of Texas. I didn’t even realize. There was a whole segment of the Santa Fe Trail here too, but looking back on it, it’s just… road.

Then following the theme of doing things but not knowing why, we went to the Springer, NM police office. I think we were looking for maps, or the visitor center. To get maps. This certainly seems logical, given our history. I’d like to say we succeeded, since we did stop at the visitor center in Springer, NM, but we did also stop at the next rest area, so who knows… who knows…

Eventually we ended up in Las Vegas, NM, which is not as interesting as you might think. We did get hit up an antique shop there, where I got a couple of things. One of which being the book The Last of the Mohicans – the movie adaption of this has one of Purples favorite soundtracks, and we had been listening to it over the past couple of days, so when I saw the book, it seemed right to get it for him.

Since we were sorta following the Santa Fe trail, we stopped at a memorial near Pecos National Park. I picked up a cool rock.

Our next stop was one of those “hey, that looks cool, turn around and go back” deals. The Canoncito Sculpture Garden is some art stuff that’s just… there. There’s a lot of welded artwork, depicting horses and hearts, and a lot of things carved out of rocks.

Finally, at long last, we arrive at Home of Eternal Return, the highlight of the day. Home of Eternal Return is an art installation by the collective known as Meow Wolf. Basically they just got like 100 artists, and a big warehouse area, gave them a theme+story and said “make something”. There’s a whole thing about different dimensions and time travel and stuff, with an interactive plot woven in. Once you collect all the information, you should have enough knowledge to open a safe at the end for a final piece of the puzzle. Lots of newspaper article, books, lights, and just stuff. We spent several hours wandering through and exploring, but I didn’t get many pictures.

The art never stops, of course, they have a great gift shop, which stocks keychains, and a giant robot outside.

That mostly sums up our trip to New Mexico. We headed out, and backtracked across a lot of the road already traveled, eventually diverging at the previously mentioned Springer, before stopped at a truckstop 10km north of town. That’s probably where the NM keychain came from.

That just about wraps this one up, only a few more to go, if you’re still reading, big thanks.

Summary

• Daily Distance: 811km / 504 miles
• Total Distance: 5044km / 3134 miles
• Keychains: 2 new, 15 total
• Maps acquired:
  • Georgia
  • Alabama
  • Florida
  • Texas
  • Louisiana
  • Arkansas
  • Oklahoma
  • New Mexico (new!)
• Days behind live: (days until June 14)